Faculty lecture: The Challenge of Climate Change

What is our current understanding of climate change caused by human activity? Come along next Thursday to hear Professor Sir Brian Hoskins of Imperial College (and Director of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change) highlight the achievements of climate science, its limitations and challenges.

Professor Hoskins will also discuss the role of the UK Committee on Climate Change (of which he is a member) and its analysis of the possible limitation of climate change, the technologies to achieve this, and the challenges that have been set for the UK.

Questions for FST's elected representative on Senate

Dr Aneta Stefanovska from Physics is the elected representative on Senate for The Faculty of Science and Technology and represents the wider interests of members of the faculty.

As part of the package of changes proposed by the Senate Effectiveness Review and approved by the Senate, it has been agreed that Senate members should have a standing invitation to submit written questions relating to matters that are the responsibility of Senate to the Vice-Chancellor.

Aneta would therefore like to hear from anyone who would like to discuss issues appropriate to the business of Senate. If you have questions you would like Aneta to consider raising at the November meeting, please get in touch with her directly at aneta@lancaster.ac.uk before Monday 26 October.

Faculty forum: change of dates for 2009/10

The forum originally scheduled for Wednesday 11 November has been changed to Wednesday 25 November at 4pm, Conference Centre room 3

The forum originally scheduled for 2pm on Wednesday 10 February will now take place at 4pm in Conference Centre room 4

The forum originally scheduled for 2pm on Wednesday 19 May will now take place at 4pm in Conference Centre room 4

SciTech Graduate School

Faculty Christmas conference: Tuesday 15 December

All research students and contract research staff are invited to submit a poster for the SciTech Christmas conference. Two £200 cash prizes will be awarded for the best posters; one for contract research staff and one for research students. £100 will be awarded to the runner up. You will be able to submit an abstract and title on the SciTech website from Monday 26 October.

Research Development Programme

Graduate School courses for this term are online. Check out the Research Development Programme web page for more details of what's on offer and the training requirements for this year: www.lancs.ac.uk/sci-tech/postgraduate/rdp. New courses will be added to the website soon.

SciTech Grad School Forum

We are looking for postgraduate research students and early career researchers to become members of the SciTech Grad School forum. We want to know what you want from the SciTech Grad School and the type of activities you would like to happen. This is your opportunity to have your say! If you are interested in this please contact Liz Hurrell.

Free SciTech Grad school diaries

A limited number of SciTech Grad School academic diaries are available to postgraduate research students. Please come and collect from Liz Hurrell, B1a, Engineering building.

Funding Roundup

Andy Binley from LEC has been awarded a grant from the US Department of Energy “Geoelectrical Measurement of Multi-scale Mass Transfer Parameters”. This is a collaboration between the US Geological Survey, Penn State University, Oregon State University, Pacific Northwest National Lab and Lancaster. The aims are: (1) to develop and demonstrate geophysical approaches to measure mass-transfer parameters spatially and over a range of scales; (2) to provide independent mass-transfer estimates for improved understanding of contaminant fate and transport at DOE sites, such as uranium transport at the Hanford 300 Area in eastern Washington state. The total award is $1.2M and Lancaster’s award is $211k. This will support a PhD student based at Lancaster.

Plamen Angelov from the Department of Communication Systems was awarded £42K from the Ministry of Defence for a project entitled “Intelligent Leader – Follower Algorithms for Ground Platforms”. This programme is in coordination with QinetiQ and is a pre-cursor of a bigger 2 year project on Reducing the Burden on the Dismounted Soldier (RBDS) Capability Vision (CV).

Fabrice Andrieux, the Lloyd's Register Educational Trust Senior Research Associate in the Engineering Department, has been awarded £107,000 from Sellafield Ltd to fund a post-doctoral research assistant to work on a project entitled "In situ and real-time measurement of plutonium and uranium in active media using the Micro-Optical Ring Electrode (MORE)".

Your Grant News

There is sometimes a time-lag in getting information about grants awards in the faculty. We would like to communicate the information as soon as it becomes available, so when you hear about a successful grant please contact Katherine Gill with a two-sentence summary to go in the Bulletin as well as information about the funder, amount awarded, title and a link to provide further details if appropriate.

News and Events

16.4m Awarded to Further Research into Accelerator Science and Technology

The Cockcroft Institute, a partnership between the Universities of Liverpool, Lancaster and Manchester, has been awarded £16.4million to further research into accelerator science and technology.
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Tropical Crop Research Prompts Air Pollutant Warning

An "environmentally friendly" tropical crop could lead to hazardous increases in levels of the air pollutant ozone according to new research, led by Lancaster University (UK) and published in the US journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
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£9.2m for 'Advanced Manufacturing'

The Engineering Department is a member of a six institute consortium who have been awarded £9.2M by EPSRC to support the Innovative Electronics Manufacturing Research Centre (IeMRC) to February 2015
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Thai Students Meet Lancaster Researchers

Gifted students from a specialist Thai academy met Lancaster University researchers this week
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Lancaster Engineer Appointed As Chair Judge for iawards Transport Category

Engineering's Roger Kemp has joined the 12 member iawards judging academy headed by James Caan. The academy formed of high profile representatives across industry, science, technology and media are responsible for creating a shortlist of entries, and ultimately choosing the winner for each category.

The next SciTech Bulletin will be on Friday 30 October. Please send feedback or items for inclusion to sci-tech@lancaster.ac.uk